Red Hat Seeks Limits on Software Patents

eldavojohn writes "RedHat went to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals asking for limits on software patents yesterday. They have not uploaded their full brief yet online, but promise to post it soon. Here's a tidbit: 'Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the event they are faced with a future lawsuit. Red Hat also provides open source intellectual property protections through our Open Source Assurance Program that protects our customers and encourages them to deploy with confidence. Our strategy is a prudent one and mitigates the risk of patent lawsuits, but it would be unnecessary if the system itself were fixed.'"

Comments

Re:I sometimes feel sorry for the RedHat brand

[Anonymous Coward]

So while people piss and moan on /. and other forums, and praise Ubuntu or whatever flavor of the month, real work does get done on Windows Machines.

Re:Infinite goods.

[gnupun]

That's the problem. It's hard to centralize profit when an idea can be replicated forever over the wires.

When the product takes $0 cost to build, only the idea is valuable and that's why patents are a good idea. It's fair that the patent creator/owner gets compensated for their genius (in cases where the patent is non-trivial).

On the flip-side, open-source in particular shows that instead of benefiting the top of the pyramid, wealth can be spread around much more evenly giving everyone the benefits and moving the area of competition to a different market.

LOL... open source is like slavery. Millions of users (eg: RedHat) use the product to make billions, while the actual creators of the software work for free (less than what african slaves earned centuries ago), and have to get a second job to pay for their living.